Here from Mr Twitter, himself
Business Futurist | Foresight Strategist
If you’ve read this far, something probably connected.
Maybe it put words to something you’d been sensing but couldn’t quite land. Maybe it made something complicated feel clearer. Maybe it unsettled a position you thought you’d settled.
Good. That’s where this work lives.
Not forecasting. Not scenarios at 2050. Not more noise. What’s already moving. The shifts most organisations can’t yet see, name, or understand the full weight of. What it means. What to do about it while it’s still a possibility, not a problem. Short term and long.
Morris Misel has been doing this for 30 years across 160 industries, with boards, executive teams, and leadership groups in Australia and internationally. More than 2,800 engagements. Over a million people a year through conferences, boardrooms, and media.
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Choose Forward.
Williams described how Twitter users were driving its evolution in directions the founders had not planned, including hashtags, retweets, and real-time event coverage. The insight was that the platform value was emerging from how people used it, not how it was designed. That pattern repeats with every genuinely significant platform shift.
The test is whether it changes what people can do, not just how fast they can do it. In 2009, Twitter was enabling information to move through social networks rather than institutional channels. That was a structural shift, not a feature improvement. Those structural shifts are the ones worth paying serious attention to early.
Organisations that waited until Twitter was mainstream before paying attention had already missed the window to understand it. By 2011, it was reshaping media and politics. The businesses that studied it in 2008 and 2009 had years of advantage. Dismissing early signals as noise is a common and costly habit in strategic planning.
The pattern is consistent. A platform starts with an unclear use case, builds an unusual early community, and gets dismissed by mainstream observers. Underneath, it is changing something structural about how people connect or share information. Watching that early community closely is more useful than waiting for analysts to validate it.
Build the capacity to observe and adapt early, rather than predict and plan late. Twitter evolved faster than any forecast said it would. Organisations with people watching it and experimenting in real time were better positioned than those who waited for certainty. That preparation habit matters more than any single platform decision.
